Man Loss
I was losing men left and right. I’d had them by the dozens, caught in the bottom of a turned up t-shirt.
Their small bodies squirmed against each other. They made miniscule noises, sometimes tiny pleasure sounds. Sometimes they yelled with their small voices, “Pick me! Pick me!”
God, I wanted to pick one. At night, I lay wet in bed. I imagined certain of their small hands against me, the little vibrations of their tiny touches shot through me like small bullets. If I loved one well enough, perhaps it would grow.
I pictured picking one. I would dig him out of the crowd and he would be mine. First, I would take him to the sea. Then, I would take him to the fields. I would want him to experience both endlessness of the sea and the expanse of the grass as the measure of our love.
I was weeks lost in the rapture of ravenous daydreams of this type. I swooned in my bed so heavily I couldn’t go to work.
“You can’t do this again,” my boss said.
“I’m very, very faint,” I said.
I imagined the intricacies of our perfect love, how we would treat each other, the ways in which we would plant seeds and water them, work the soil until it sprouted and then blossomed into pleasure gardens, where we’d stay for infinity or else quite some time.
While I daydreamed in this manner, the men were escaping in manners specific to their personalities. The angry ones gnawed holes in the cloth and fell to the freedom of the floor, running away with angry shouts. The sad ones let their tiny shoulder slump, then walked away slowly, their small steps sounding like white noise. This was much like losing a very large pile of sugar one granule at a time.
“I’ll end up with nothing,” I thought. I looked over what was left.
Most of the men were injured from fights with the angry ones, and unable to escape. They had injuries on scaled to their small bodies: pin prick scars on the forehead, tiny snapped arms, miniature black eyes. They slowly began to escape me, leaving small trails of blood on the floor behind them. The last one, I do remember, had a broken leg and it took him quite some time to find his freedom.
I sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. I scratched my head. I thought that it must take a lifetime to learn to manage and ultimately master companionship.
A new silence stretched out into a pleasant horizon, blank and beautiful as the sunset. I didn’t have to think about anything except the precise moment I existed within. I was required only to stare out the window into the city beyond my apartment, the daydreams of the world glittering sharp into the night.